Diarmuid Breatnach
(Reading time: 3 mins.)
An Irishman, Daniel Tatlow-Devally is one of five people who allegedly damaged equipment in the Israeli arms company Elbit in Germany last year. They are charged under anti-terror legislation and kept in solitary confinement in separate jails.
Daniel’s mother complained that for a month friends and relatives were prevented from making any communication with the detained: “They thought we’d disowned them.” By the time the trials are expected to conclude, the five will have spent around around 11 months in custody.1
Two weeks ago Daniel’s father addressed the weekly Dubs for Palestine rally outside Leinster House in Dublin to raise awareness of his son’s situation and to ask for support. A protest at the German Embassy has been organised for Monday 27 April at 1pm.2
In recent years the German state has earned a reputation for repression of freedom of expression of pro-Palestine sentiments or criticism of the Israeli Zionist state, including banning demonstrations, classifying anti-Zionism as ‘anti-Semitism’ and arresting people for wearing the kiffiyeh.
A 2025 report “documents how German authorities systematically curtail freedoms of assembly, expression, academia, and art when it comes to anti-genocide protests and advocacy for Palestinian rights …
… from legal repression, criminalisation, and surveillance to delegitimizing dissent within the educational sector, arts, and media. Such measures …. form a pattern of political persecution that undermines democratic principles and international human rights obligations.
European legal expert Alice Garcia of the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC) cautioned that current practices in Germany are “unequivocally comparable to practices of authoritarian regimes.”
The Civic Space Report 2025 by the European Civic Forum identifies Germany as one of the most repressive EU states in relation to Palestine advocacy, highlighting the systematic misuse of public order laws and excessive use of executive and police power (European Civic Forum, 2025, p. 20).3
Their police have been widely accused of violence towards peaceful demonstrators and a video circulated widely on 28 August 2025 showing a Berlin police officer punching Kitty O’Brien twice in the face, causing her to bleed and the same officer snapped the humerus bone in their arm.4
O’Brien was charged with assault but the circulation of video of the incident caused the police to change the charge to ‘insulting the police’ by calling them “genocide supporters”.
Speaking on RTÉ’s News at One on 5 August, Kitty described their injuries after arriving home from hospital the previous day: “I have a broken nose, a broken humerus bone (with 11 screws holding the bone together), and potentially long-standing radial nerve damage.”5
Last year an independent protest took place outside the Dublin German Embassy about the treatment of Kitty O’Brien, other Palestine solidarity protesters and the German state’s collusion with the genocide of Palestinians by the ‘Israeli’ state, its biggest supplier of arms after the USA.
HISTORICAL GENOCIDE ‘GUILT’ USED TO JUSTIFY GENOCIDE TODAY
Ironically, Germany’s ruling class uses the Nazi history of its state’s genocide of Jews (also Roma, Disabled, Gays & Lesbians, Communists etc) as justification for its support for the Zionist state’s genocide of Palestinians today. But that ‘guilt’ also infected the Left resistance movement.
For many years large sections of the German Left would counter calls for solidarity with struggles of national liberation abroad with their support for anti-nationalismus (anti-nationalism), erroneously identifying that as the source of fascism, rather than just a factor exploited by fascists.
In the mid-19th Century and up until the 1930s, most observers expected Germany to be the first socialist state, so powerful were its communist and social-democratic movements. Even after the Communist Party had been banned by Hitler, it received around 4.8 million votes.
After the defeat of Nazism in the Anti-Fascist War (WWII) the USA recruited not only Nazi scientists but also Nazi intelligence agents for its anti-Soviet campaigns and built NATO as an imperialist military alliance and a specifically anti-communist alliance, with Germany at its heart.
The USA built military bases across Germany and, after the fall of the USSR, began to spread NATO membership in states eastward to encircle Russia.
The German state has hard economic motivation for supporting the Israeli state in addition to any ideological reasons; after the USA, Germany is the biggest arms supplier to the Zionist State6 and approved $7.8 million in arms exports to Israel during the USA and Israel’s strikes on Iran.7
Daniel can be written to:
Daniel Tatlow-Devally,
JVA Ulm,
Frauengraben 4,
89072 Ulm,
An Ghearmáin.
End.
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Footnotes
1https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/germany-five-activists-held-alleged-elbit-systems-break-in-isolation-families-say
2The German Embassy’s address is 31 Trimleston Road, Booterstown in the south-eastern Dublin suburbs, about 10 minute’s walk from Booterstown train Station on the DART system. By BUS: Rock Road, Bellevue Avenue – Routes serving this stop: 4, 7, 7A, 8. CAR: No parking available on site – on-street parking (Pay & Display, max. 3Hrs).
3https://elsc.support/resource_ext/repression-of-palestine-solidarity-in-germany/
4https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0905/1532044-irish-activist-berlin/
5Ibid.
6https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/11/germany-arms-transfers-to-israel-reckless-unlawful-and-risks-complicity-in-israels-international-crimes/
7The approvals ran from 28 February to 27 March and were disclosed in responses from the Economy Ministry to queries by The Left party.
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